


The king is dead, long live the king

by ConvenientAlias



Category: Zenda Novels - Anthony Hope
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, POV First Person, the major character death is the king
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-05 21:58:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17927132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: When the king dies in captivity, Rassendyll's left in a pickle, and decides it's time to come clean to Princess Flavia.





	The king is dead, long live the king

We might never have learned of the king’s death if not for Johann. I know for one that Michael would have tried to conceal it for as long as possible; it was not to his advantage that we know he no longer had anything to hold over us. Well, perhaps I exaggerate—rumors would have gotten out eventually, I am sure, but it could have been days, weeks, months. As it was, we had it the night after the king died that he was dead. Dead of a fever, not of foul play. We wouldn’t have believed it if not for the fact that for Michael himself it was so very inconvenient.

Sapt and Fritz and I all sat in the parlor, pondering. We doubled the watch around the house, set most men patrolling. We knew these would be desperate times now, and Michael would be desperate to get rid of me—what else had he left to do? We knew we couldn’t let him kill us all in our sleep; that was about all we knew.

I regret to say none of us shed a tear. Perhaps Fritz and Sapt cried later, in privacy. In fact I can’t imagine Sapt didn’t. They had known the king for some time, unlike me. But all of us had for a while been thinking of the king as a political figure, a chess piece, rather than a person. And we were now considering whether there were any moves left to our game.

Fritz was the only one, in fact, to speak of the king personally. He said, “At least Johann said he was too delirious at the end to be afraid.”

“At the end,” I reflected glumly. “Well, what does it matter? Black Michael’s killed him either way.” I was feeling bitter. Not so much because Rudolf my cousin was dead but because I had anticipated rescuing him. It was going to be what made the rest of this nonsense worthwhile, and now it would never come to pass.

Neither Fritz nor I had the audacity, the insensitivity, to speak what was really on our minds. Only Sapt dared. He said, “Well, we have lost one battle. We still have a king.”

I looked at Sapt, and Sapt looked at me. I rose from my chair.

“We have a queen,” I retorted. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m an Englishman named Rassendyll, not one of your royal blood—the throne cedes to Flavia, as it must.”

“Yes,” Sapt said, “and she’ll be married to Michael within a year.”

“Hang Michael!”

“If we could safely kill Michael,” Sapt said, “I would have done it some time ago.”

I clenched my fists. I was torn. Part of me wanted to go conduct a solitary mission on Zenda to assassinate Michael; I felt robbed of the adventure I had planned on for rescuing the king, and at any rate I had to at least protect Flavia. Part of me wanted to put the crown on and sit on the throne and live happily ever after and forget the real Rudolf ever existed—or, I suppose, forget that Rudolf Rassendyll ever existed, more like. I knew pretty well I couldn’t do either, no matter how much Sapt would have liked me to do the second.

“I’m going to talk to Flavia,” I said.

“And say what?”

“Everything,” I said fiercely. “We can’t steal a throne. If she wants me rather than Michael, fine! But I won’t take her crown from her. And I won’t lie to her anymore, either. And you can’t stop me.”

Sapt sighed. “You are perhaps right. Very well, sire. Do what you must.”

It did not escape my notice that he had called me “sire”. He was already getting ahead of himself.

* * *

 

Flavia was staying at the hunting lodge at that time. She’d come because of the wound I’d gotten from Rupert of Hentzau—everyone had heard I was sick, and she’d been frightened, supposed I might even be dying. Oh, poor woman. Her betrothed really was dead, but not her lover, and while she had been here to care for me, she had not even known he had suffered.

She was anxious when I came to her room. She knew something was wrong. She’d seen Johann come in to talk to us, and she’d heard the orders to double the watch, and she’d known me and Fritz and Sapt were meeting together. So of course she knew something was going on with Black Michael; what else could it be? She asked me, “Rudolf, what’s wrong?”

I sat down on her bed. We were alone in her room, which was improper. But it was a lot more improper that I was currently impersonating her fiancé, so I figured we’d passed that point. I said, “I have a story to tell you, Your Highness.”

She settled next to me. She was shivering a little. She had known for some time I was keeping something from her; now to disclose just what that something was.

“I… Well, I suppose I should start with an introduction. I am not the king. My name is Rudolf Rassendyll. I am an Englishman, related to the Elphberg line only tangentially. I…” I could only repeat myself, because she was staring at me in confusion. “I am not the king.”

“Rudolf, you can’t be…”

“I have been impersonating the king,” I said, “for some months. Not for any selfish purpose, I swear. The king has been in great danger. He was abducted before his coronation by Black Michael, and if I hadn’t been around, Michael might have killed him. So I was standing in his place to keep…”

My explanation was coming out very hodge-podge. It was some time before I made any sense of it. I talked for maybe some fifteen minutes while Flavia did little but watch me. She interrupted at first, a couple times, telling me not to joke—I told her I was not joking. I told her she could ask Sapt or Fritz to confirm my story, and they would.

That convinced her I was serious. Fritz might have agreed to help me play a harmless prank on Flavia, but not a big one like this. Sapt would never agree to help with a prank at all.

I finished off by saying why we had come down to Zenda, to try to extract the king, and about Johann supplying our information. It was an anticlimactic finish. I was not ready to tell her about the king’s death yet. But I could not give her time to get up any hopes or misunderstand the situation. So when she asked me, “Then… was there news of the king tonight?”, I had to tell her.

“Tonight,” I said, “the king is dead.”

“The king is…”

“He died of sickness. It comes of keeping a man accustomed to fresh air in a dungeon. Black Michael isn’t the best nurse, I guess.”

She turned pale. “Rudolf is dead?”

“He is,” I said. “That’s why I came to tell you this. Until now I have been in the king’s service, so my lies were halfway excusable. Now the king is no more. I’m an Englishman, but I’ll serve you in any way you wish. You are the true queen; I am a play actor.”

I knelt at her feet. She looked down at me, and she didn’t seem happy about it.

“This is a lot you have told me tonight,” she said slowly.

“I am sorry we did not confide in you earlier.”

“I…” She stood. “I think I should talk to Sapt, as you suggested. I should get some details straight.”

She fled the room, leaving me kneeling, frozen.

* * *

 

One must give Flavia credit. My life had changed overnight, and so I had cast my troubles to her, for her to choose the right path for us all to follow. Her life had changed considerably more, but she had no one to make her choices. Yet she summoned me the very next day, with a look of resolve on her face. She had done her thinking, and done it very quickly.

“If I ascend the throne now, we can expect Michael to attempt another coup,” she said. “That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Michael wants the throne pretty badly, Your Highness.”

“He let Rudolf die for it.” She bit her lip. “I knew… but Rudolf dead. We were friends, when we were younger. Of a sort. Not that we ever knew each other so well, but…” She glanced at me, then looked away. “I’m sorry. I should not put my grief on you. You have no responsibility for my emotions—I’m surprised you’ve put up with them as long as you have, and I’m very…”

“Flavia,” I said. “Flavia.”

She looked at me.

I knew that I had failed, then, in my storytelling. I had been carefully factual about matters, trying to paint myself as a loyal friend to our common cousin Rudolf, trying not to be too presumptuous when there was no reason for her to love a commoner. But I had been cold. I had not considered that, leaving out my love for her, I had as good as lied—and I had left her feeling like an idiot.

“You may say anything you want to me,” I said. “I love you, you know. That was never a lie. Anything—anything I can do for you, I will. And you may trust me with anything at all.” I held out my hand. “Give me your pain, if I can hold it.”

She did not take my hand, but rather threw herself into my arms. While she had been resolved earlier, she was still unnerved. She did not cry, but she did clutch me tightly, and it was a long moment before she drew away again.

“I was thinking last night,” she said. “Is it terrible that I thought to myself that I would be more sad for you to be dead, than him? I was relieved to think that the man I love—the man I’ve known since the coronation, my king—was still alive. But it’s heartless, isn’t it? I should have loved my cousin.”

What was truly heartless was how guiltily glad I was to hear her say such a thing. But I did not say that; it would have been too much. I said, “Falling in love with him post-mortem won’t bring him back to life. I loved you, you loved me back. Though it’s an accident that brought us together—an accident and a wicked man’s scheming—it is not wrong to value what we have.”

She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I suppose we can’t think about things like that right now. The king is dead. If I become queen, the wolves will be at my throat. They’ll make me marry Michael.” She lifted her chin. “I won’t marry a murderer.”

“I’ll never let him have you,” I promised. Again, my mind swirled with images of storming Zenda single handed to plunge a dagger in Michael’s throat. It would have been cathartic, even if it certainly would have gotten me killed.

“I… you love me, Rudolf,” she said. “I can’t ask you as your queen to stay here and continue this charade. But…” Her eyes glistened hopefully.

It was the sort of thing a lover could ask a lover. For love, after all, one is supposed to do everything.

I warned her, “It will mean the power of the throne will remain with me—officially, at least. We can’t exactly say I’m your Prince Consort when I’ve already been crowned. It means letting an imposter take the throne. I may be a Rudolf, but I’m still just Rassendyll.”

“If I have to choose between a Rassendyll and a murderer for my country, I don’t think the choice is difficult,” Flavia said drily. She crossed her arms. “I will expect you to consult with me on any matters of state. But the title… A queen is expected to share it anyhow, in this country. You’re…” She laughed a little hysterically—still full of bottled up emotions—and shrugged. “You’ve proved yourself a good enough king to fool the country, at least. I’ve seen your legislature. I doubt Rudolf Elphberg would have done any better.”

“Well,” I admitted, “a lot of that came from Sapt.”

“So already we have sound advisors. We also have a fomenting rebellion. Rudolf, we can’t afford to have you leave right now.”

“Then,” I said, “for the present…”

She took my hand. “For the country, I’ll ask you to stay for the present. For myself…” She trailed off.

I told her, “I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me.”

“Then,” she said, “til death do us part.”

For the first time since I revealed my identity to her, we kissed. She liked kissing Rudolf Rassendyll just as well as she ever liked kissing the king.

* * *

 

Sapt was unbearably smug. I say unbearably because he was the one who was always telling me not to romance Flavia for myself in the first place, but only for the king—and he was the one who was always talking about his loyalty to the blood of the Elphbergs. I don’t think I inspire that kind of loyalty, so I’ll assume his changed position was due purely to hatred of Black Michael. To be fair, I think hating Black Michael is reason enough for anyone to back an imposter to the throne and commit high treason. I hate that man myself.

So Sapt was unbearable, but Fritz’s happiness for me was a bit easier to swallow. He was still sad about Rudolf, but he was happy for me not just as an acceptable king but as one lover is happy for another. He’d always suffered seeing me pine for Flavia, and neither of us had imagined it might ever turn out well. Though, to say the death of a king is well… I shy from the phrase, yet somehow, with Flavia, I cannot help it. I am happy.

It took us a while to get rid of Black Michael. I will not go into the details on that—suffice it to say that we couldn’t prove any of his treason but we eventually proved he was committing tax fraud and bribing certain officials, and issued an arrest warrant. We didn’t get him. He fled the country, and will doubtless be back to cause more trouble eventually… But one day’s worries are enough, and while the royal spies keep an eye on his activities, I try not to worry too much about it for now.

Flavia and I are as happy as one might reasonably expect. I have slowly begun to tell her true stories of my childhood, and my young adulthood, and every stage of life before I took on the mask of a king. We are making plans to get my brother to visit at some point, so she may meet one member of my family. I assume I can trust him to keep a secret.

For now, picture us sitting over a desk, poring over a long piece of proposed legislature, trying to make sense of it and wondering what Sapt’s opinion will be. Or if you wish, picture us visiting the hunting lodge at Zenda again, on vacation—a grim place but one that holds many memories, and is in some ways the place where I was twice crowned, though I was only officially crowned once, and that in a cathedral. Picture us outside the hunting lodge, lying under a pine tree, her head in my lap and my hands in her hair, neither of us wearing a crown, merely dreaming, until the time comes for us to return to business. These moments are far too rare—work keeps us far too busy—but I know just how lucky I have been to get any at all, and what price they come at. And I am grateful.


End file.
